I think the term you're looking for is "burnup", not efficiency.
Yes, current reactor designs burn 0.3% of the xkcd comic's uranium, clear showing how disingenuous it was to refer to it when talking about reactors.
PWR use 0.3% of the available energy density. This brings us back to Storm van Leeuwen and Smith whose analysis was to asses the net energy return of the Nuclear industry. For the expected 300TWh's output of a new AP-1000 energetic estimates for construction of a nuclear power plant is somewhere between 11TWh and 35TWh, energy cost for demolition around 55TWh to 70TWh, that's around a third before you start. Yet you still have to factor dismantling and clean up of the core alone 5.6TWh's - 16TWh's. They talk in Peta-joules but I've done the conversions to put it in a frame of reference that will be easier to understand.
Your numbers are off.
Your point was the amount damage done to the land from mining and conveniently overlooks that 3000SqKm of land that has been rendered useless from Chernobyl. The OP said Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage. and you replied Coal mines and coal mining can however.
I will make them unambiguous for you. It takes approximately 75,000,000 tons of processing soft ore from the earth to fuel one reactor. I say approximately because it may take more rock processing because the yeild is lower.
It will take more energy to process granite than to process sandstone. As for my numbers...
Even if I accept your dubious claim
Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enrichment you've consumed over 100TWhs without a 1/3 core refuel every ten years for forty and we haven't even factored energetic costs of a spent fuel containment facility or the logistics of moving spent fuel safely.
Like Oil, all the cheap uranium is gone.
(and the link was not illuminating),
Well it doesn't matter if you don't want to read it. It has been peer reviewed and not even the Nuclear Industry itself has attempted, but has been unable to refute it with a similar peer reviewed document. This is the science on the nuclear industry itself, if you can't accept the findings then you will remain uninformed and unable to challenge your beleifs.
then that's still a net positive.
Today's reactor design have a roughly 40 year life span. During the early phase of the plants life span most of the operational issues were resolved so that in the reactors middle age it has a relatively trouble free operation. Now that the reactors are approaching the end of thier life span the materials that the reactor were built with are becoming embrittled, corroded, seals begin to fail.
So operators (as seen in Fukushima) squeeze everything they can get because once that reactor is shut down - it's a tomb that cannot be disassembled for ten to a hundred years, good bye income, hello ongoing operational costs, hello cobalt 60, iron 55, tritium, carbon 14 and calcium 41 amongst others. It takes ten to fifteen times the energy cost of a coal or gas power plant to dismantle. Who do you think will wear those energetic costs?
Then there is the CRUD - Chalk River Unidentified Deposits, where a lethal combination of highly radioactive fission and actinide elements from leaking fuel rods in the reactor core itself were discovered. Every reactor has it and *safe* dismantling of the 450 odd reactors worldwide will have to deal with a energy expenditure of almost half of the entire facilities constructi
Absolutely. Distances withing the cluster would be interesting, considering the black holes compressed them together.
Not so ; the suggestion is that the black hole interactions stripped the outer parts of the cluster off, leaving the most-tightly bound core region.
The distances between the stars within the most-tightly bound core region, ejected is what I was interested in.
I read the main article however the summary says (compressed into a space just a few dozen light-years apart) I must have missed where the suggestion was made about stars being striped off, but it's very interesting. You can only imagine what that would look like over millions of years. Thanks for pointing it out.
This is one of the reasons I love about being a geek and getting excited about these epic galactic movements that make our lives look completely insignificant.
You forgot that the plutonium is FUEL and should go into a reactor, not the ground.
No I didn't. If you knew anything about what I actually thought you would know that it includes the storage AND use of the fuel.
You forgot that DU is a toxic metal that can be bread into valuable fuel, but it is not a radiological hazard.
No I didn't. I actually support the development of reactor technology. As for being a radiological hazard it is an alpha emitter and probably an iron analogue (IIRC)
Those shock pix you posted were a wide variety of birth defects caused by a wide variety of things.
I regret to inform you that they are not. This is the consequence of DU weapon use. It's been said that soldiers were also exposed to the dust and tried to warn children away from the exposed areas.
Your posts have the ring of the nutter about them.
Yeah well, sooner or later the pro-nuclear fanboi drops an ad-hom attack.You guys are pretty predictable.
You could easily verify each and every statement I have made but won't because that would gore your sacred cow.
You are approximately correct with some things you said however, it's ok to understand the reactor technology, but to get an understanding of the entire industry you have to go a lot further.
Biological concerns are real as we are biological human beings. It's just common sense to understand how the consequences manifest and affect the human condition rather than just believe they don't exist.
If I was satisfied that you knew the difference between radiation and radionuclide and had sent me something that would be informative I would read it.
For example, do you dispute my claim that about 95% of 'spent fuel' is actually viable fuel if reprocessed?
No. I just think that if you are going to attempt to use that 95% you had better do it once and you had better do it properly. The entire nuclear industry needs to be completely redesigned from the ground up because in its current form it is a mess in every step of the industrial process and building safe reactors is un-economical for this version of the Nuclear Industry.
I support a spent fuel containment, with reactors and fuel reprocessing facilities grouped in the belly of a geologically stable granite mountain. Reactor facilities that last 100-600 years and then are encased into the mountain to dispose of the entire reactor facility and the fissile ash it burnt the spent waste you are talking about into. I just don't know if the bold America that built the Apollo, that had the imagination to engineer really large nation building projects like that, exists any more.
If you have a pragmatic, unemotional evaluation of the nuclear industry you would see there are many structural issues, like management of radionuclides, CFC114 emissions from enrichment, energetic expenditure of mining and reactor disposal, that is in such a mess it needs a legal construct such as The Price Anderson Act to keep it financially viable from insurance liability.
The difference is I think we have no choice but to do it because it's irresponsible to hand a radionuclide legacy to future generations the way a carbon legacy was handed to ours. Humans generations after ours will suffer the consequences of what we face in this age, simply because we were ignorant of them and refused to take the proper actions to deal with it.
Look it up. If true, multiply the humongoud number in the article you linked by 0.05 and get the true figure.
humongoud number?
I think I'll stick with Accident Sequence Precursors and Basis Design Issues as my guide. We could also go into research on post-Chernobyl Thyroid cancer rates in children. What about the 2005 Energy Act funding allocations for C
Sorry you feel that way. Hang on to your hate of the other N word, perhaps it will comfort you in the future when you don't have enough electricity to run the ever more important air conditioner.
Wow, another belief. I don't hate nuclear power. The available evidence and science shows us that Nuclear power not only has no net energy return it also requires artificial legal constructs to make it economically viable.
If it was done better it might have a chance but with guys like you arguing against any improvements Nuclear power has an uncertain future.
I see no point in arguing with someone
You have no argument, you just have 'true believer' statements which have been debunked without me even having to refer to my research so I don't really care what you do.
who can't remember what was said 2 posts back anyway.
I'm not willing to guess which one of your posts you are referring to. Be specific and I will debunk them for you.
I read that as they always fail and the reason that they always fail is because people cut corners.
No.
Well how many do you need?
For nuclear to actually be less safe than the alternatives---many many many more.
An ridiculous assertion. Solar, wind, wave and geothermal are many orders of magnitude safer as their radioactive inputs come from the sun.
If you're thinking I disbelieve in radioactivity you are wide of the mark.
I realize its about what you believe and not about what you understand.
Most of the fear abouy nuclear activity is hype.
No, most of the hype about Nuclear activity is PR double speak.
Indeed, 3000sqKms at Chernobyl sure is a lot of land, a pity there are others.
Well done, intentionally misinterpreting an argument to pretend you've won. Clap clap you win here, have an internet for the day.
What a foolish thing to say. No one wins from coal or nuclear industry effluents. We all loose.
For minimising deaths per kwh, Nuclear is better than all other forms of energy.
No.
For minimising the taking land out of use for other things, nuclear is better than all other forms of energy.
No
Yeah, Chernobyl blah blah. You have no idea how much land coal mining uses and contaminates. And renwables for a country sized amount of energy need to be country sized. That takes a lot of land just for the energy collecting devices, never mind the land used and contaminanted in the mining and manufacturing process.
No. That has nothing to do with creating a proper place to store Nuclear Industry waste products. However it does show that you know very little about renewable energy technology.
We don't? What about PWRd sunning aat about 45 GWd/ton, versus coal plants at about 2.5MWh per ton. There's about 7 orders of magnitude in there. So we do.
No, we don't. Try to produce an estimate for the amount of energy used to decommission the reactor and the availability of the reactor over its lifetime and then you will understand why current nuclear reactors are obsolete. So no, we don't.
No, I mean a conventional reactor that we already have. A Candu is well suited for that but we do know how to purify the result enough for any current reactor.
CANDU reactors which have a notorious reputation for being difficult to operate and some serious safety issues:
Can we have severe safety problems in the country of design and shut half of them down, CANDU!
Can we generate much greater quantities of spent fuel than light water reactors, CANDU!
Can we generate large quantities of tritium and expel it into the biosphere, CANDU!
Can we generate large quantities of Plutonium 239 for weapons proliferation, CANDU!
Can we make it harder to operate safely than a Yanky reactor, CANDU!
Additionally CANDU has a lower burnup rate than PWR. So it's completely inappropriate for that task even before we start talking about all of the other issues.
Radon is already in nature. Menu people had to put vent fans in their basement to deal with natural radon. With a half-life of 3.x days, the radon isn't going to travel far.
True, it also causes lung cancer when breathed so that's why people use fans to extract it. If the half-life negated the threat then people wouldn't need to use the fans.
They extract the gas because the decay products that result after its half life is complete are still carcinogenic, stick to dust and can be inhaled.
Weren't we talking about waste in America? However, you can still use the heat from the distillation, so it's not like it's wasted.
So, in other words, it's not a "bit of energy" as you said, it's actually "a lot" of energy that you would attempt to recover. As for the liquid waste effluents in America I doubt it's as simple to deal with them as simply as you believe - even if you could specify what they were.
So, what your saying is, just leave them in the lockers and bins where they are stored now scattered across the country side where anyone can access it. No need for any waste facility and centralized access control because you think everything is perfectly fine where it is and we don't really need a waste facility at all?
It wouldn't do much harm to just leave them where they are, but if it makes you feel better, bury them with the radioactive fly-ash from the coal plants in the conventional landfill. Or just throw them in the trash.
Well as long as you maintain an attitude where you think the Nuclear Industry doesn't require any improvements it is difficult to talk your arguments seriously. The airline industry doesn't shirk from it's responsibilities to protect peoples live. The U.S Nuclear Submarine fleet has extensive safety procedures to protect submariners. Even the coal industry is constantly improving the efficiency of the power plants.
From what you're saying further investment in the Nuclear Industry is not therefore warranted and increased lobbying, pointing to the lack of a properly constructed waste management facility, will provide further justification to shut it down the Nuclear Industry completely. I thought anyone who supported the Nuclear industry would praise additional infrastructure as a sign of a healthy industry.
It would seem your your efforts to sabotage the Nuclear industries progress is as effective as the anti-nuclear campaigners - I am certain they will applaud your efforts.
Not really. 2 million MPH is only like.003c, and the nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away. You'd still be looking at a good 833 million years to get there.
True, at least you would be traveling in style, if you could live that long.
Interstellar distances are huge. Intergalactic distances are brain-destroyingly huge.
Absolutely. Distances withing the cluster would be interesting, considering the black holes compressed them together.
Well then hop to it! In what way do you find depleted uranium to be a NUCLEAR waste problem?
Because it is the by-product of attaining fissionable nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors.
How would it compare to beryllium for example or mercury released into the environment?
Do I really have to show you another google image of DU babies in Iraq. That is how it compares.
Do you deny that we know how to reprocess 'waste' into fuel and a hotter but shorter lived waste?
No.
On what basis?
The very article this whole discussion is about. There is no where to put fissile ash after it's made.
Showing everyone your ass isn't much of a debunking.
Highly toxic radioisotope have certain properties that exist, even when you believe they don't. Apart from being Alpha, Beta and Gamma emitters at varied energy levels, at microscopic levels they act like nutrients in the environment that are toxic when ingested. As a carcinogen in the body it is delivered to whatever organ uses that nutrient, as it's analogue, where it continues to decay, emitting radiation in the body until after some years cancer begins to form.
For those babies, that I doubt you have the courage to look at, their mothers ingested DU, which is the by product of creating fuel for nuclear reactors. While those babies grew insider their mothers they were exposed to alpha emissions from u238 circulating in the blood or other body fluids where it was deposited into their own bodies as they mutated before they were even born.
It is a most indiscriminate form of warfare that actually makes land mines look like a preferable option. Still if you want to completely destroy a population over time that would certainly be a great way to do it as there is plenty of DU in dust form there to last generations. but hey, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
DU is the non-fissionable part of uranium. Fissionable uranium does not come from the Uranium fairy it comes from an industrial process called "enrichment" which is the industrial activity of the Nuclear Industry.
It will take a lot more than OMG it's got atoms in it! to debunk my debunking of an alarmist article.
The only problem is you didn't actually present any fact to debunk the article with. You did, however, show that you don't know very much about the subject, like all true believers. I suggest that you actually read it and from there try to discover something about the facilities they are talking about.
U238. If we simply re-oxidise that and shove it back into the natural rock formations we got it from, how have we created a hazard that wasn't there since man evolved? It would actually be a bit LESS radioactive than it was before.
You would provide a radionuclide source that would introduce carcinogenic radioisotopes nutrient analogues into the food chain.
Meanwhile, weapons grade Pu239 is also known as high quality nuclear fuel. As CrimsonAvenger points out, it is now being used as such.
It's also a source of extreme toxicity when a reactor has an accident, as shown in Unit 4 Fukushima. You see the toxicity is a different property from radioactivity.
Pick any reputable source and look up the composition of 'spent' fuel rods. You'll see that it is about 95% usable fuel (after reprocessing). So when you read about all those tons of spent fuel, note that only 5% of it is actual nuclear waste. Also note the composition of that waste. None of it has the huge half-life that leads to the horror stories about needing to store it long after nobody can read English anymore and all that crap. It will be less radioactive than the background levels in about 500 years. It will be reasonably safe after 250 years. Those figures are on the web as well.
Not according to Oppenheimer, you know, the guy that invented the nuclear bomb. I've read some of his work on the toxicity of pu-239 which finds it to be fatal to humans in the 1 - 10 MICROGRAM range so it's not the big lumps that concern me.
As far as your wild fantasy about the half life of pu-239 designed to ignore the physical properties of radioisotope decay into its daughter products, it's just stupid.
As for the last part, note that the leftover slag and sludge from coal and oil will still be carcinogenic in 500 years. If we treated the coal and oil industries like we treat nuclear, they would be forced to find a way to destroy it or prove that they could store it until the end of time. We would certainly not let them pile it up outside and then put it in a landfill.
Well they are both poisonous industries, but guys like you are unwilling to challenge your belief systems with the actual facts and science to see past it. Until you do you will parrot the same mindless groupthink that afflicts all dogmatic skeptics.
Any time you can present some actual *facts*, I'll be happy to evaluate them. In the meantime there is very little credibility in your arguments.
No, the OP said (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners). I read that as the reason the failures occur is because of cutting costs and corners. Not 'all the plants' fail.
That leaves two bad powerplant disasters in the world ever.
Well how many do you need?
I'd say the assessment of "always seem to fail" is an outright lie.
well that's your paraphrasing that you base that on.
The scary OMG half life hype is just that: hype.
No, that's the properties of the radio isotope as they decay into daughter products.
In terms of unusable land and deaths, nuclear beats all.
Indeed, 3000sqKms at Chernobyl sure is a lot of land, a pity there are others.
The main reason is because the energy density of Uranium is about 7 orders of magnitude over that of coal. Those 7 extra orders of magnitude add up fast.
Yeah, real shame we don't have a reactor that can utilize that energy density.
No need to look at any further of your comments, the ones in this thread proof you a fucktard with no knowledge at all.
Really. iKnow you are an apple iFanboi who is an iExpert in iUSB cables.
But I notice both halves of your iWit are using the word 'fucktard', so I know that's progress. If you combine them you'll be a 'fuckwit' then you can walk around the apple shop with a badge that says iFuckwit. I'm sure that's what people are thinking you are when they iTalk to iYou, iI iKnow iI iAm.
I think the point the OP was making is that radioisotopes at Chernobyl consumed 3000sqKm of land and covered it with highly radioactive pu-239 whose half life of 25000 years is effectively forever. It seems to me they are both different degrees of bad. Talking about coal though, as bad as it is, is pretty OT wrt solving spent fuel containment. We have coal and uranium problems to solve. What we have to learn from being left a carbon legacy from coal use is not to leave a radioisotope legacy for future generations. Containment has to be resolved.
Meanwhile uranium mining uses Acid leech mining to get uranium and while the area is quite small the impact can render entire water tables unusable. This is particularly bad for an arid country like Australia yet the Nuclear industry is happy to use it here while it is illegal in the US and Russia. Hardly an ethical position, but technically ok.
The reason they do that is because it take roughly 500tons of ore to yield 1 kilo of uranium and approximately 900tons of Uranium to produce 1 kilo of fissionable Uranium usable in a reactor. A reactor core requires roughly 150tons.
It may not take as much surface area however, it now consumes approximately 1/3 of the power output over the life time of the reactor just to produce the fuel. The peer reviewed science has been done which shows that there is no energetic benefit from Nuclear power in its current form.
Before you ask for a citation it's peer reviewed and uses U.S government standards for industrial process measurement.
Seriously, though if you're trying to make nuclear energy look bad, please don't compare it to coal unless you're trying to actually make it look good.
Well the coal industries externality is carbon into the atmosphere and no one wants to pay for that. So who wants to pay for the Nuclear industries' externalities? The nuclear industry is obsolete until it deals with this spent fuel containment issue, which it described as a non issue that would be solved in the 80's.
Nuclear only looks good when you don't actually understand the full implications and ignorance won't protect you from the consequences.
Nuclear energy is many many orders of magnitude more energy dense than coal.
Unfortunately none of the reactors in operation can utilize any more than 0.3% of that energy density. Yes, less than one percent, nuclear reactors are fantastically inefficient.
What people generally don't realise is...
What the hell all of this talk about coal has got to do with the over whelming need for spent fuel containment in a geologically sound facility. No evolution of the Nuclear industry will come without that.
The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that most of the mining now happens in poor countries or in the middle of absoloutely nowhere (i.e. Austrailia).
Having traveled to the area you may not be aware that it is also a World Heritage National park and one of the most beautiful places in the world with a huge amount of bio-diversity where they do the acid leech mining for these reactors. You may think it's unreasonable but why should I risk my back yard for you?
Of course there has already been a 2 million litre spill of that acid there because the tanks weren't maintained - so commitments really mean nothing.
I know you can't appreciate it but if you give me your address I'll send you a fresh turd for you to put on your kitchen table so you'll get some idea what it means to me. In the meantime I'll continue to lobby government to shut it down and you can buy uranium from the south africans. We all win.
It's actually easy to crunch the numbers. In terms of deaths per kWh and land rendered unusable, and a whole bu
Most of that 'Waste' is fuel that should be 'burned' in a reactor.
You mean in a "burner" reactor like IFR? That works for transuranics but still doesn't solve fissile ash or reactor disposal and the associated energy costs. Maybe when appropriate materials technology is available. Have you heard of what "Net Energy Return" is for a Nuclear Reactor?
The tailings came out of the ground in a mine and when the mine is depleted, they can go back in. The area will be less radioactive than it was before we started.
Except that now the radon gas that was previously contained can make its way into the water table courtesy of gravity. Next stop: Foodchain. What sorts of effects do you think highly soluble radon gas would have on apex predators, like humans, when they drink it?
So who do you think will pay for all of that?
The depleted uranium is just metal, nothing special about it except that it's density makes it a pretty good material for armor piercing rounds. We can use it for things like that,
You mean things like this. And as it goes on for generations in Iraq, do you think that Americans would point to that and say proudly to their children and grand children "see what we did for you"?
Personally, that's something I feel all the nice Americans will feel shame about, do you think I am wrong?
bury it,
Where?
or breed it into fuel
With what?
(or particalize it and blow it into the air like coal plants do, but I don't recommend that one).
When it's in the coal plant, does the magic enrichment fairy come along and process it out of it's natural ore into a fissionable uranium or does it just not matter where radioactive isotopes that get into the food chain come from?
The liquid waste is mostly water, if we apply a bit of energy to it (perhaps from a nuclear reactor), we can diminish that considerably and have a more manageable waste.
Really, how much energy do you think that would take at Fukushima? Will you check my math? 1 Calorie heats one litre of water 1degreeC which is 4.18 joules. If we assume 10degrees C average, hell lets make it a balmy 20 degrees C - it gets quite hot in Japan! So 80 degrees C = for 1 litre = 334.4 joules - but lets drop the decimal place to make it easy for me. So 334 times 1000 litres = 1 ton of water = 334000 joules per ton. and 300 tons per day = 100200000 joules/86400 seconds =1.159kW per second, lets call it an even 1kW per second = roughly 86400kW.per day just for the waste water. That's quite a "bit" of energy isn't it, just for Fukushima waste? How many homes do you think that would heat?
Then again what make you think it's water, perhaps the "344.5 million liters of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing" is referring to CFC114, perhaps it's strawberry milk? Would you swim in it?
The tools and such are low level waste. We don't want kids playing with it, but it's not worse in general than the various carcinogenic waste from coal and oil.
So, what your saying is, just leave them in the lockers and bins where they are stored now scattered across the country side where anyone can access it. No need for any waste facility and centralized access control because you think everything is perfectly fine where it is and we don't really need a waste facility at all?
Just think of the many gallons of toxic waste created when you build a solar thermal plant (and by toxic waste, I mean in the porta-pottys).
You mean, like the stuff dribbling off your chin right now? - hahah - just joking!
Up a few posts in the thread, I enumerated them showing that most of that waste is either not actually waste, not radioactive, or not radioactive enough to warrant such concern.
Do you think you possess all the facts? Perhaps the 52,000 tons of weapons grade pu-239 is deadly for a least the 25000 years of it's half life. Have you considered that you are ignoring the facts because you have a belief system that nuclear power is safe that you are unwilling to challenge?
Is there anything that you can share that shows you're not ignorant of the facts, or anything specific that you can say without slandering National Geographic and challenging their ability to check facts as it is quite a reputable organization?
That while that 'sobering article' wasn't quite a lie, it was edging very close to the line to make the nuclear waste situation look much worse than it actually is.
That's interesting, is there something specific to draw attention to?
No, fucktard, you didn't offend me, you amused me with your stupidity. You can tell how stupid you are by not being able to tell. Thanks for the laugh.
I actually read through your iComments all touting apple products, you are the king of apple iFanbois, your expertise in USB cables is...pointless!
I can tell how iOffended you are by the empty ad-hominem attacks, that's how iKnow iOffended iYou. In tech parlance - iPwnd you. See what I did there - that's called wit. If you work and study very very hard you may work up to half, one day. ooops, iOffended you again, tomorrow, when you work that comment out.
You are welcome, iLook forward to not iOffending you again, meanwhile iLaugh at iYou.
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What sorts of effects do you think highly soluble radon gas would have on apex predators, like humans, when they drink it?
A lot better than if it was drunk by something further down the food chain.
A scary thought for humans either way.
-- Watch this Heartland Institute video [youtube.com]
great video - thanks for the link.
Yes, current reactor designs burn 0.3% of the xkcd comic's uranium, clear showing how disingenuous it was to refer to it when talking about reactors.
PWR use 0.3% of the available energy density. This brings us back to Storm van Leeuwen and Smith whose analysis was to asses the net energy return of the Nuclear industry. For the expected 300TWh's output of a new AP-1000 energetic estimates for construction of a nuclear power plant is somewhere between 11TWh and 35TWh, energy cost for demolition around 55TWh to 70TWh, that's around a third before you start. Yet you still have to factor dismantling and clean up of the core alone 5.6TWh's - 16TWh's. They talk in Peta-joules but I've done the conversions to put it in a frame of reference that will be easier to understand.
Your point was the amount damage done to the land from mining and conveniently overlooks that 3000SqKm of land that has been rendered useless from Chernobyl. The OP said Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage. and you replied Coal mines and coal mining can however.
I will make them unambiguous for you. It takes approximately 75,000,000 tons of processing soft ore from the earth to fuel one reactor. I say approximately because it may take more rock processing because the yeild is lower.
It will take more energy to process granite than to process sandstone. As for my numbers...
Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enrichment you've consumed over 100TWhs without a 1/3 core refuel every ten years for forty and we haven't even factored energetic costs of a spent fuel containment facility or the logistics of moving spent fuel safely.
Like Oil, all the cheap uranium is gone.
Well it doesn't matter if you don't want to read it. It has been peer reviewed and not even the Nuclear Industry itself has attempted, but has been unable to refute it with a similar peer reviewed document. This is the science on the nuclear industry itself, if you can't accept the findings then you will remain uninformed and unable to challenge your beleifs.
Today's reactor design have a roughly 40 year life span. During the early phase of the plants life span most of the operational issues were resolved so that in the reactors middle age it has a relatively trouble free operation. Now that the reactors are approaching the end of thier life span the materials that the reactor were built with are becoming embrittled, corroded, seals begin to fail. So operators (as seen in Fukushima) squeeze everything they can get because once that reactor is shut down - it's a tomb that cannot be disassembled for ten to a hundred years, good bye income, hello ongoing operational costs, hello cobalt 60, iron 55, tritium, carbon 14 and calcium 41 amongst others. It takes ten to fifteen times the energy cost of a coal or gas power plant to dismantle. Who do you think will wear those energetic costs?
Then there is the CRUD - Chalk River Unidentified Deposits, where a lethal combination of highly radioactive fission and actinide elements from leaking fuel rods in the reactor core itself were discovered. Every reactor has it and *safe* dismantling of the 450 odd reactors worldwide will have to deal with a energy expenditure of almost half of the entire facilities constructi
cheap...cheep..chepe..chEep..CHEEEEEP
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These girls don't like Putin very much either: plus the song is hilarious!
Yikes! Do not google that at work without safety settings
Damn, I wish I could mod that comment funny - and informative!
Not so ; the suggestion is that the black hole interactions stripped the outer parts of the cluster off, leaving the most-tightly bound core region.
The distances between the stars within the most-tightly bound core region, ejected is what I was interested in.
I read the main article however the summary says (compressed into a space just a few dozen light-years apart) I must have missed where the suggestion was made about stars being striped off, but it's very interesting. You can only imagine what that would look like over millions of years. Thanks for pointing it out.
This is one of the reasons I love about being a geek and getting excited about these epic galactic movements that make our lives look completely insignificant.
No I didn't. If you knew anything about what I actually thought you would know that it includes the storage AND use of the fuel.
No I didn't. I actually support the development of reactor technology. As for being a radiological hazard it is an alpha emitter and probably an iron analogue (IIRC)
I regret to inform you that they are not. This is the consequence of DU weapon use. It's been said that soldiers were also exposed to the dust and tried to warn children away from the exposed areas.
Yeah well, sooner or later the pro-nuclear fanboi drops an ad-hom attack.You guys are pretty predictable.
You are approximately correct with some things you said however, it's ok to understand the reactor technology, but to get an understanding of the entire industry you have to go a lot further.
Biological concerns are real as we are biological human beings. It's just common sense to understand how the consequences manifest and affect the human condition rather than just believe they don't exist.
If I was satisfied that you knew the difference between radiation and radionuclide and had sent me something that would be informative I would read it.
No. I just think that if you are going to attempt to use that 95% you had better do it once and you had better do it properly. The entire nuclear industry needs to be completely redesigned from the ground up because in its current form it is a mess in every step of the industrial process and building safe reactors is un-economical for this version of the Nuclear Industry.
I support a spent fuel containment, with reactors and fuel reprocessing facilities grouped in the belly of a geologically stable granite mountain. Reactor facilities that last 100-600 years and then are encased into the mountain to dispose of the entire reactor facility and the fissile ash it burnt the spent waste you are talking about into. I just don't know if the bold America that built the Apollo, that had the imagination to engineer really large nation building projects like that, exists any more.
If you have a pragmatic, unemotional evaluation of the nuclear industry you would see there are many structural issues, like management of radionuclides, CFC114 emissions from enrichment, energetic expenditure of mining and reactor disposal, that is in such a mess it needs a legal construct such as The Price Anderson Act to keep it financially viable from insurance liability.
The difference is I think we have no choice but to do it because it's irresponsible to hand a radionuclide legacy to future generations the way a carbon legacy was handed to ours. Humans generations after ours will suffer the consequences of what we face in this age, simply because we were ignorant of them and refused to take the proper actions to deal with it.
humongoud number?
I think I'll stick with Accident Sequence Precursors and Basis Design Issues as my guide. We could also go into research on post-Chernobyl Thyroid cancer rates in children. What about the 2005 Energy Act funding allocations for C
Wow, another belief. I don't hate nuclear power. The available evidence and science shows us that Nuclear power not only has no net energy return it also requires artificial legal constructs to make it economically viable.
If it was done better it might have a chance but with guys like you arguing against any improvements Nuclear power has an uncertain future.
You have no argument, you just have 'true believer' statements which have been debunked without me even having to refer to my research so I don't really care what you do.
I'm not willing to guess which one of your posts you are referring to. Be specific and I will debunk them for you.
No.
An ridiculous assertion. Solar, wind, wave and geothermal are many orders of magnitude safer as their radioactive inputs come from the sun.
I realize its about what you believe and not about what you understand.
No, most of the hype about Nuclear activity is PR double speak.
What a foolish thing to say. No one wins from coal or nuclear industry effluents. We all loose.
No.
No
No. That has nothing to do with creating a proper place to store Nuclear Industry waste products. However it does show that you know very little about renewable energy technology.
No, we don't. Try to produce an estimate for the amount of energy used to decommission the reactor and the availability of the reactor over its lifetime and then you will understand why current nuclear reactors are obsolete. So no, we don't.
I looked 'a few posts back' and found you didn't actually present any facts. It said 404: argument doesn't exist. Try refreshing your belief system.
CANDU reactors which have a notorious reputation for being difficult to operate and some serious safety issues:
Additionally CANDU has a lower burnup rate than PWR. So it's completely inappropriate for that task even before we start talking about all of the other issues.
True, it also causes lung cancer when breathed so that's why people use fans to extract it. If the half-life negated the threat then people wouldn't need to use the fans.
They extract the gas because the decay products that result after its half life is complete are still carcinogenic, stick to dust and can be inhaled.
So, in other words, it's not a "bit of energy" as you said, it's actually "a lot" of energy that you would attempt to recover. As for the liquid waste effluents in America I doubt it's as simple to deal with them as simply as you believe - even if you could specify what they were.
Well as long as you maintain an attitude where you think the Nuclear Industry doesn't require any improvements it is difficult to talk your arguments seriously. The airline industry doesn't shirk from it's responsibilities to protect peoples live. The U.S Nuclear Submarine fleet has extensive safety procedures to protect submariners. Even the coal industry is constantly improving the efficiency of the power plants.
From what you're saying further investment in the Nuclear Industry is not therefore warranted and increased lobbying, pointing to the lack of a properly constructed waste management facility, will provide further justification to shut it down the Nuclear Industry completely. I thought anyone who supported the Nuclear industry would praise additional infrastructure as a sign of a healthy industry.
It would seem your your efforts to sabotage the Nuclear industries progress is as effective as the anti-nuclear campaigners - I am certain they will applaud your efforts.
True, at least you would be traveling in style, if you could live that long.
Absolutely. Distances withing the cluster would be interesting, considering the black holes compressed them together.
Because it is the by-product of attaining fissionable nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors.
Do I really have to show you another google image of DU babies in Iraq. That is how it compares.
No.
The very article this whole discussion is about. There is no where to put fissile ash after it's made.
Highly toxic radioisotope have certain properties that exist, even when you believe they don't. Apart from being Alpha, Beta and Gamma emitters at varied energy levels, at microscopic levels they act like nutrients in the environment that are toxic when ingested. As a carcinogen in the body it is delivered to whatever organ uses that nutrient, as it's analogue, where it continues to decay, emitting radiation in the body until after some years cancer begins to form.
For those babies, that I doubt you have the courage to look at, their mothers ingested DU, which is the by product of creating fuel for nuclear reactors. While those babies grew insider their mothers they were exposed to alpha emissions from u238 circulating in the blood or other body fluids where it was deposited into their own bodies as they mutated before they were even born.
It is a most indiscriminate form of warfare that actually makes land mines look like a preferable option. Still if you want to completely destroy a population over time that would certainly be a great way to do it as there is plenty of DU in dust form there to last generations. but hey, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
DU is the non-fissionable part of uranium. Fissionable uranium does not come from the Uranium fairy it comes from an industrial process called "enrichment" which is the industrial activity of the Nuclear Industry.
THAT is how it is a NUCLEAR waste problem.
The only problem is you didn't actually present any fact to debunk the article with. You did, however, show that you don't know very much about the subject, like all true believers. I suggest that you actually read it and from there try to discover something about the facilities they are talking about.
Yeeeeaaaahhh, Naaaahhh, I think they have more credibility than you do.
This is the truth you are referring to.
You would provide a radionuclide source that would introduce carcinogenic radioisotopes nutrient analogues into the food chain.
It's also a source of extreme toxicity when a reactor has an accident, as shown in Unit 4 Fukushima. You see the toxicity is a different property from radioactivity.
Not according to Oppenheimer, you know, the guy that invented the nuclear bomb. I've read some of his work on the toxicity of pu-239 which finds it to be fatal to humans in the 1 - 10 MICROGRAM range so it's not the big lumps that concern me. As far as your wild fantasy about the half life of pu-239 designed to ignore the physical properties of radioisotope decay into its daughter products, it's just stupid.
Well they are both poisonous industries, but guys like you are unwilling to challenge your belief systems with the actual facts and science to see past it. Until you do you will parrot the same mindless groupthink that afflicts all dogmatic skeptics.
Any time you can present some actual *facts*, I'll be happy to evaluate them. In the meantime there is very little credibility in your arguments.
Come to think of it, this would be a great way to travel between galaxies. This would be an excellent Intergalactic Spacecraft!
Yah!
No, the OP said (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners). I read that as the reason the failures occur is because of cutting costs and corners. Not 'all the plants' fail.
Well how many do you need?
well that's your paraphrasing that you base that on.
No, that's the properties of the radio isotope as they decay into daughter products.
Indeed, 3000sqKms at Chernobyl sure is a lot of land, a pity there are others.
Yeah, real shame we don't have a reactor that can utilize that energy density.
No need to look at any further of your comments, the ones in this thread proof you a fucktard with no knowledge at all.
Really. iKnow you are an apple iFanboi who is an iExpert in iUSB cables.
But I notice both halves of your iWit are using the word 'fucktard', so I know that's progress. If you combine them you'll be a 'fuckwit' then you can walk around the apple shop with a badge that says iFuckwit. I'm sure that's what people are thinking you are when they iTalk to iYou, iI iKnow iI iAm.
iHope iYou iComment more so iOffend iYou again.
I think the point the OP was making is that radioisotopes at Chernobyl consumed 3000sqKm of land and covered it with highly radioactive pu-239 whose half life of 25000 years is effectively forever. It seems to me they are both different degrees of bad. Talking about coal though, as bad as it is, is pretty OT wrt solving spent fuel containment. We have coal and uranium problems to solve. What we have to learn from being left a carbon legacy from coal use is not to leave a radioisotope legacy for future generations. Containment has to be resolved.
Meanwhile uranium mining uses Acid leech mining to get uranium and while the area is quite small the impact can render entire water tables unusable. This is particularly bad for an arid country like Australia yet the Nuclear industry is happy to use it here while it is illegal in the US and Russia. Hardly an ethical position, but technically ok.
The reason they do that is because it take roughly 500tons of ore to yield 1 kilo of uranium and approximately 900tons of Uranium to produce 1 kilo of fissionable Uranium usable in a reactor. A reactor core requires roughly 150tons.
It may not take as much surface area however, it now consumes approximately 1/3 of the power output over the life time of the reactor just to produce the fuel. The peer reviewed science has been done which shows that there is no energetic benefit from Nuclear power in its current form.
Before you ask for a citation it's peer reviewed and uses U.S government standards for industrial process measurement.
Well the coal industries externality is carbon into the atmosphere and no one wants to pay for that. So who wants to pay for the Nuclear industries' externalities? The nuclear industry is obsolete until it deals with this spent fuel containment issue, which it described as a non issue that would be solved in the 80's.
Nuclear only looks good when you don't actually understand the full implications and ignorance won't protect you from the consequences.
Unfortunately none of the reactors in operation can utilize any more than 0.3% of that energy density. Yes, less than one percent, nuclear reactors are fantastically inefficient.
What the hell all of this talk about coal has got to do with the over whelming need for spent fuel containment in a geologically sound facility. No evolution of the Nuclear industry will come without that.
Having traveled to the area you may not be aware that it is also a World Heritage National park and one of the most beautiful places in the world with a huge amount of bio-diversity where they do the acid leech mining for these reactors. You may think it's unreasonable but why should I risk my back yard for you? Of course there has already been a 2 million litre spill of that acid there because the tanks weren't maintained - so commitments really mean nothing.
I know you can't appreciate it but if you give me your address I'll send you a fresh turd for you to put on your kitchen table so you'll get some idea what it means to me. In the meantime I'll continue to lobby government to shut it down and you can buy uranium from the south africans. We all win.
You mean in a "burner" reactor like IFR? That works for transuranics but still doesn't solve fissile ash or reactor disposal and the associated energy costs. Maybe when appropriate materials technology is available. Have you heard of what "Net Energy Return" is for a Nuclear Reactor?
Except that now the radon gas that was previously contained can make its way into the water table courtesy of gravity. Next stop: Foodchain. What sorts of effects do you think highly soluble radon gas would have on apex predators, like humans, when they drink it?
So who do you think will pay for all of that?
You mean things like this. And as it goes on for generations in Iraq, do you think that Americans would point to that and say proudly to their children and grand children "see what we did for you"?
Personally, that's something I feel all the nice Americans will feel shame about, do you think I am wrong?
Where?
With what?
When it's in the coal plant, does the magic enrichment fairy come along and process it out of it's natural ore into a fissionable uranium or does it just not matter where radioactive isotopes that get into the food chain come from?
Really, how much energy do you think that would take at Fukushima? Will you check my math? 1 Calorie heats one litre of water 1degreeC which is 4.18 joules. If we assume 10degrees C average, hell lets make it a balmy 20 degrees C - it gets quite hot in Japan! So 80 degrees C = for 1 litre = 334.4 joules - but lets drop the decimal place to make it easy for me. So 334 times 1000 litres = 1 ton of water = 334000 joules per ton. and 300 tons per day = 100200000 joules/86400 seconds =1.159kW per second, lets call it an even 1kW per second = roughly 86400kW.per day just for the waste water. That's quite a "bit" of energy isn't it, just for Fukushima waste? How many homes do you think that would heat?
Then again what make you think it's water, perhaps the "344.5 million liters of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing" is referring to CFC114, perhaps it's strawberry milk? Would you swim in it?
So, what your saying is, just leave them in the lockers and bins where they are stored now scattered across the country side where anyone can access it. No need for any waste facility and centralized access control because you think everything is perfectly fine where it is and we don't really need a waste facility at all?
You mean, like the stuff dribbling off your chin right now? - hahah - just joking!
Up a few posts in the thread, I enumerated them showing that most of that waste is either not actually waste, not radioactive, or not radioactive enough to warrant such concern.
Do you think you possess all the facts? Perhaps the 52,000 tons of weapons grade pu-239 is deadly for a least the 25000 years of it's half life. Have you considered that you are ignoring the facts because you have a belief system that nuclear power is safe that you are unwilling to challenge?
Is there anything that you can share that shows you're not ignorant of the facts, or anything specific that you can say without slandering National Geographic and challenging their ability to check facts as it is quite a reputable organization?
That while that 'sobering article' wasn't quite a lie, it was edging very close to the line to make the nuclear waste situation look much worse than it actually is.
That's interesting, is there something specific to draw attention to?
No, fucktard, you didn't offend me, you amused me with your stupidity. You can tell how stupid you are by not being able to tell. Thanks for the laugh.
I actually read through your iComments all touting apple products, you are the king of apple iFanbois, your expertise in USB cables is...pointless!
I can tell how iOffended you are by the empty ad-hominem attacks, that's how iKnow iOffended iYou. In tech parlance - iPwnd you. See what I did there - that's called wit. If you work and study very very hard you may work up to half, one day. ooops, iOffended you again, tomorrow, when you work that comment out.
You are welcome, iLook forward to not iOffending you again, meanwhile iLaugh at iYou.